ALU: It Wasn’t Just Chris Smalls

Three Theses on What the Labor Movement Can Learn from the Amazon Labor Union’s Victory 

By Manuel Carrillo and Anya Mae Lemlich

Since the Amazon Labor Union’s (ALU) victory on March 30, we’ve seen countless articles citing the ALU’s “unconventional” and “unorthodox” organizing tactics. We believe that their tactics — a strong worker committee inside the workplace, worker-to-worker organizing skills, and creating camaraderie — are tried-and-true methods that both socialists and radical labor organizers know work. But importantly, what was new and exciting about the ALU’s win was their willingness to take risks, put forward bold demands, and the level of control and decision-making power that workers themselves had over the campaign.

Here are three theses on what we took from the ALU’s victory:

1) A Committee of Rank-and-File Worker Organizers

“What we noticed was that they didn’t really have too much of a workers committee inside of the building like we do in Staten Island. That was one of their biggest mistakes.”

Christian Smalls on the podcast Chapo Trap House

When the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) attempted to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama in 2021, two worker organizers from the JFK8 Staten Island Amazon warehouse went to help the effort. Christian (Chris) Smalls, a worker leader who was fired in March 2020 for leading a walk-out protesting a lack of COVID-19 safety measures, and his coworker, 6-year warehouse worker Derrick Palmer, tried to talk to workers in Bessemer. “So when I went down there I’m expressing to them, like, I’m here as an actual worker, former worker, trying to make that bridge saying this is the reason you need to sign up for the union, and I thought that would be helpful to their efforts,” Chris said on an episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily. But he continued, “[RWDSU] didn’t allow us to rally. They barely wanted us to talk to workers.”

Ostensibly, RWDSU organizers didn’t want Chris’s story of retaliation — that he got fired for organizing at Amazon — to scare workers. The fear the boss can create through retaliation — that’s real! And we’ll come back to it soon. But the real story is that RWDSU did very little to find and empower worker organizers who could provide strength and encouragement to their coworkers by standing up for each other in the warehouse. 

The campaign in Bessemer relied on staff organizers, prominent public figures including celebrities, and groups outside of the community in Alabama. Instead of building up a strong worker committee inside the workplace who could take ownership of the campaign and talk to their coworkers, they relied on paid staff and media attention. RWDSU organizers only talked to workers outside the warehouse gates, not visiting workers at their homes, away from employer surveillance. And the organizers standing outside the warehouse gates were not workers themselves, as they would be at JFK8. 

After being denied the ability to talk to Amazon workers in Bessemer — and after the Bessemer union loss — Chris and Derrick decided that their model of organizing in the JFK8 warehouse would look different. That meant having workers themselves lead the campaign. 

Derrick explained: 

“The main reason for me was going down there and seeing how Bessemer handled their campaign, the fact that they weren’t engaging with these workers was a red flag, about working with a big union … we knew [starting our own union] was going to be harder, obviously resources, you know, money, that’s what big unions provide. But the fact that we’re the workers and we’re going to connect with them? That’s all we really needed to know.” 

Workers themselves connecting with other workers inside a shop — this is the key ingredient for successful organizing. It’s what organizers mean when they talk about the importance of a strong “worker committee”: a team of committed workers who take on leadership and learn how to organize their coworkers. These are the people like Derrick Palmer, Angelika Maldonado, Michelle Nieves, Brima Sylla, and others who organized their coworkers to form ALU together in JFK8. 

And it’s the opposite of the RWDSU strategy in Bessemer. When Amazon workers ran into union organizers at the bus stop outside of the JFK8 warehouse, instead of talking to outsiders or union staffers, they were talking to their own coworkers — people like them who understood what it was like to do the same grueling work, day in and day out. 

You Can’t Third Party This Union 

For Chris and Derrick, running a union campaign where the workers were the ones organizing meant that they had to create their own independent union. This way, they ensured that the worker committee themselves were the ones calling the shots. Decisions around tactics and workplace actions weren’t being developed in boardrooms in D.C. or Manhattan by staff who’d never worked in a warehouse. By remaining independent, ALUs worker committee had full control and oversight over their campaign’s strategy and decision making, rarely the case in campaigns run with the support of most large, established unions.

When Amazon’s anti-union campaign tried to sell workers on the idea that the union was an outside “third party,” it fell flat. The union was their coworkers. Of course, the response to a company trying to “third party” the union should always be, “no, the union is us — the workers,” because this is the kind of labor movement we’re fighting for. With the ALU, this was especially hard to disbelieve.

For us, the lesson is that a strong worker-led campaign is essential to win — and essential to transform our labor movement. This doesn’t mean that we only need to form new, independent unions in order to do this, however. Some established unions are better than others at building up strong committees of fighting worker organizers who can take real ownership; and it’s the key task of the labor movement to re-introduce this type of shop floor-centered, democratic organizing across all our unions. 

It Wasn’t Just Chris Smalls

At ALU’s victory press conference, ALU president Chris Smalls spoke: “It’s not about me, Amazon tried to make it about me from day one — and I never said it was gonna be Amazon versus Chris Smalls — it’s always gonna be Amazon versus the people. […] And today the people have spoken, and the people wanted a union.” 

It wasn’t just Amazon who tried to make it about Chris. Most of the media, too, has focused almost exclusively on Chris’s leadership in the campaign. Chris’s leadership is important — the labor movement needs visionary, respected leaders who come from the shop floor and are committed to worker-led organizing and rank-and-file democracy. It’s probably true that the win at JFK8 would not have happened this soon, or in this way, had it not been for Chris. And yet the decisive factor was not Chris’s leadership, but the leadership of the entire worker committee in the shop (who Chris himself helped recruit!).

When labor organizers talk about building worker committees, they often talk about finding “organic leaders” — workers who have built a lot of trust and respect with their coworkers and can move them to do hard things. The worker committee at JFK8 was made up of many “organic leaders.” Derrick Palmer, the vice-president of ALU, has worked at Amazon for six years. “He has a larger influence on his coworkers,” says Chris. 

Chris’s firing in March 2020 likely instilled more fear into the JFK8 warehouse. This isn’t surprising — bosses use retaliatory tactics like firing outspoken or committed organizers as tools to sow fear and division, in order to make it harder to organize. According to Chris, Derrick Palmer helped overcome this fear. 

“His coworkers know who he is, they see him all the time in the media speaking out about workers’ rights, speaking out about their rights because he’s an Amazon worker, and that helped encourage workers to not be afraid anymore,” said Chris on Chapo. “Because they’re like, wow, Derrick’s been here… and he still hasn’t been retaliated against. So the retaliation rumors and stuff like that started to dwindle because he’s still employed and he’s not fired or on a final [warning] or on a write-up.”

2) Worker-to-Worker Organizing Tactics Are Not New 

“Everyone thinks we had these tactics worth thousands of dollars but basically we were just being ourselves.”

Angelika Maldonado on the EWOC panel

Worker organizers relied on existing relationships among their coworkers to be able to have conversations about the union and move people to stand up for themselves. This is a key tenet of worker-to-worker organizing — that we organize through the existing connections in a given workplace. Imagine you’re scared of taking a risk to stand up to the company at your workplace — how different would it feel to have a conversation about organizing with a friend, or even someone you’re friendly with at work, versus a total stranger? 

Michelle Valentin Nieves, one of the worker leaders, explained what this was like for her. 

“I’d already been at that facility for three years, so I pretty much already knew a bunch of people and I was already a familiar face … So they would feel, for the most part, they would feel comfortable speaking to me, when I would go up to people and try to speak to them about the union.”

Brima Sylla, another key organizer and a leader in the African community in Staten Island, was able to connect with many of the immigrant workers in a way that other organizers weren’t. “I’ve got skills… I speak French, Arabic, English, and three African languages,” he told Eric Blanc in Jacobin. “So that made it a lot easier for me to communicate with immigrant workers inside the building. And there are a lot of us here at Amazon.” 

Another tried-and-true tactic in organizing is that we tell the truth to each other — that we dig deep to be honest about what it’s actually like to work for a company that sucks our soul, what we want and can’t get in our lives because of it. We tell our own stories to each other because that’s part of where our power comes from! Angelika described how in conversations with coworkers who didn’t know her, she was most successful when she was vulnerable. 

“[I’d] let them know that I’m a single mother of a 4-year old child, I have a son. You know, I work 12.5 hour shifts three days consecutive, and on my off days, I’m here every day. I would say about 90% of the time that’s when people would really listen to me.”

Creating Camaraderie 

So much has been made of the bus stop outside the JFK8 warehouse that you might get the sense that every organizing conversation happened there. As Chris has elaborated in many interviews, it was the “inside outside” strategy that worked — the organizing going on inside the warehouse was absolutely crucial to the win. While the bus stop organizing was not the deciding factor, it was still crucial in recruiting new worker organizers, helping workers feel strong, and creating a sense of community. 

Workers at the bus stop passed out food and weed, and paid for their co-worker’s taxis to the hospital. They had BBQ’s and bonfires late at night, and they blasted music and sang songs together. These aren’t wildly new tactics, but the workers at JFK8 got creative with how to create a supportive culture among coworkers, and they prioritized this community in a way many campaigns don’t. 

Standing Up to Fear

Amazon spent millions to create fear in the warehouse: hiring paid union-busters, holding captive audience meetings, and trying to scare people into not only voting no, but also staying silent. The ALU worker committee counteracted this by using powerful methods that many unions use. They spoke up in captive audience meetings, so that workers would see that they weren’t afraid to go up against the union-busters. In fact, Brima Sylla joined the worker committee after seeing Cassio, an ALU member, get kicked out of one of these meetings after “correcting the lies they were telling us.” 

The ALU committee was also visible about their support for the union inside the warehouse, passing out t-shirts and lanyards to workers. This is a key organizing tactic to make people feel strong by showing support visibly. As Chris said, “we had organizers that were vocal in the building, that were wearing ALU shirts from day one, and we were passing them out inside the building, just showing workers that you can’t be afraid when you’re going up against your employer. You gotta stay militant, stay together.” 

3) Assessing Conditions, Being Bold: We Have to Take Risks

The ALU was public about unionizing from the very beginning of organizing, even before they started collecting signatures. Unlike many union campaigns, they didn’t have an “underground” period, where workers are organizing in secret, away from the boss, to build up support and prepare workers before the anti-union campaign starts. And when they did file with the NLRB for a union election, they did so with only 30 percent support from the workers in the warehouse — the bare minimum needed to hold a union election. In fact, the first time they filed, they had to withdraw because they had less than 30 percent. In contrast, most unions’ rule of thumb is to file with a supermajority — usually aiming for 60 to 70 percent support — with the assumption that workers will get scared and lose support during the long, drawn-out campaign between filing and the election. 

These are risky moves that fly in the face of the labor movement’s conventional wisdom. But at Amazon, and particularly the JKF8 warehouse, these strategies made sense. Turnover in Amazon warehouses is 150 percent each year. Every time the ALU would try to get above 30 percent signatures, many of those signatures would be invalid, because so many people didn’t work there anymore. 

The lesson is that we can defy conventional labor wisdom, but we don’t have to. The particular conditions in this Amazon warehouse — the high turnover rate, 8000-person workforce, union-dense city, and the early COVID organizing — meant that organizing publicly from the beginning and building support after filing worked for them. But it won’t fit conditions everywhere. We have to take risks, but we have to be smart about the ones we take. 

Finally, it helped that the ALU put forward concrete demands like “$30 minimum wage! Longer lunch breaks! Free shuttle buses to work!” These were born from the shop floor, and raised expectations for workers. They weren’t promises or guarantees of what the ALU would accomplish — instead they were pointing towards a vision that said, we will fight and win these together.